Behavior problems in the classroom often are caused by students who are bored and not engaged. Identifying and understanding your students' learning styles is helpful when planning engaging lessons and activities. Grouping students with similar learning styles will result in more successful cooperative learning. This is a great infographic for visual learners like me to understand the different learning styles.

Sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), this one-of-a-kind book demonstrates the best tools, resources, and techniques for discovering, selecting, and integrating interactive open educational resources (OERs) into the teaching and learning process. The author examines many of the best repositories and digital library websites for finding high quality materials, explaining in depth the best practices for effectively searching these repositories and the various methods for evaluating, selecting, and integrating the resources into the instructor’s curriculum and course assignments, as well as the institution’s learning management system.

The millennial generation is the biggest benefactor of the internet explosion. It is safe to conclude that the late stage of the millennials is entirely dependent on the web. The average millennial is equipped with at least one internet-enabled device. The Internet of Things concept, which connects several devices to communicate, makes a huge percentage of generation Y digitally driven in performing mundane tasks. The benefits of the internet’s rapid growth have trickled to the youngest generation; school going children. The digital education culture intensifies with age as individuals realize the importance of the internet in making substantial educational progress.

Availability of a Vast Array of Information and Educators Wikipedia and Google Search are inevitably a student’s best companion. It could take hours to compile information from the traditional library scavenging. The internet is a literal concentration of billions of data bytes, accessible with a serial of clicks. Wikipedia is especially a powerful connectivity platform that links the profiles of experts on informational web pages, as is other newly developed channels such as LinkedIn. TedX has a flood of creative entrepreneurs who are changing the world’s thinking. Some of the explored topics highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the current educational system.

It's a damning indictment of our collective resistance to truth that the point of this article still has to be restated, yet again. Amazingly, 93% of the general public and 76% of educators still erroneously believe that we should be taught in ways that match our learning styles. I assume this is so in the US - unless things have changed recently, the percentages, for teachers at least, are even worse in some other countries where the idea has been pushed harder from the top down, such as the UK and Netherlands. To be quite clear: this belief is not…

Welcome to the second article in a series devoted to grounding PBL in the standards. As you explore the ideas in this article I do hope you can see that our content standards provide a wonderful opportunity for our students to do, a concept at the foundation of PBL. Before reading, please take a moment to subscribe to this blog by RSS or email and join me on twitter at (mjgormans). Taking that moment ensures that we can continue to network. Also, please share this post with others and even provide a re-tweet. Most of all, thanks for being one of those over 25,000 visitors a month,over 10,000 subscribers, and possibly one of the thousands of educators that have attended my workshops at schools and conferences. Also, remember that I can come to your conference or school district and provide engaging, authentic, affordable, and purposeful professional development. Please check my Booking Page to see how I could be part of your school PD or Conference plans. Thanks so much. Michael Gorman (mjgormans@gmail.com).

Art is one of the most underutilized resources in today’s ELA classroom. The Roman poet Horace claimed, “A picture is a poem without words” meaning art and written word are different mediums of expression. Art offers students a break from written words while continuing to develop the same skill set needed to be successful readers through challenging students to think both critically and analytically.

A podcast is a topic-specific digital stream of audio files (in some cases, video or PDF also) that can be downloaded to a computer or a wide variety of media devices. They are funny, entertaining, educational, often short, and rarely boring. They can cover news, current events, history, or pretty much anything the creator would like. When you subscribe, each new episode is automatically downloaded to your device, to be played at your convenience. You can play the entire stream or select an individual episode as part of your technology in the classroom arsenal. Here’s how to use technology in the classroom podcasts to enhance your class.

To foster a love of art in children, we must teach it at primary schoolIf we want children to value art, we must give them access to it early on in life. Here’s how primary schools can make space for creativity

For schools that find it difficult to dedicate an hour a week to art, teachers should still aim to include short bursts of creativity in the school day. It’s no secret that arts subjects are increasingly being deprioritised in many schools, and that there’s a fall in the number of pupils taking arts subjects at GCSE. Yet the arts matter, not only to individual learning but to the UK as a whole: the creative industries currently contribute £84.1bn a year to the economy.

Enthusiasm for art should really start at primary school – by the time students reach year seven, attitudes about what matters in education will have already been established. The national curriculum for art and design is sparse and leaves a lot open to interpretation, meaning that provision varies greatly between schools. With pressures on pupil progress for reading, writing and maths, it’s not uncommon for a whole term to pass without one art lesson.

Creativity can be taught to anyone. So why are we leaving it to private schools?

Most of the primary teachers I’ve spoken to say they miss teaching art. Even those who don’t think of themselves as artistically minded acknowledge that pupils are missing out on a vital part of education and life if art is excluded. So what can primary schools do to offer more opportunities for creativity? There are a number of small improvements that can make all the difference.

Map out a curriculum for the whole schoolMost teachers won’t have the time to develop a comprehensive art curriculum by themselves. But if school leadership creates time for staff to work together and share ideas, it’s possible to create something worthwhile.

In 2013, The Guardian suggested reading aloud was coming back into fashion. That might be an overstatement. But, in our family's life, it fills an emotional and entertainment niche that nothing else does.

Do you speak Minecraft? If you don’t, I highly recommend taking a minute to ask your students about this popular computer game — now with an education edition. They will likely passionately describe adventures they’ve taken in this block-based open world, where the only limit to what they’re able to create is their imagination.

As a world language teacher, I’m always trying to find ways to leverage digital learning strategies to immerse students in the Spanish language and find engaging, meaningful experiences to be able to hone their language skills.

Game-based learning using Minecraft gave me the opportunity to design worlds where students can work and play together while communicating in Spanish.

Global corporations, non-profit organizations, booster clubs, sports teams, small businesses — while different in design and objectives, they all have one common goal: achieve results. While the role of human resources varies as much within these different organizational structures as do their individual missions, there exists a common element in the relentless pursuit of results that lead to greater profit, more members and increased awareness. That bond is the organization’s need for a culture rich in innovation and rooted in learning.

Chapter 3 of my open textbook on ‘Teaching in a Digital Age‘ is about theory and practice in teaching for a digital age, which I am still in the process of writing. I have to admit that I approached writing about learning theories with some dread. In particular I was concerned (in order of dread) that: this will appear incredibly boring/lack originality, because it has been done so many times before by other, more qualified authors (but then those that already know this stuff can easily skip it) I’m not sure that theories of learning actually drive teaching (although surely an understanding of how students learn should do so) I would have to deal with connectivism somehow, and I am certainly not an expert on that topic – but maybe that might be an advantage in bringing it to the attention of people who have previously shown no interest in it, and how it differs from previous theories it could be argued that past learning theories are made irrelevant by digital technologies (and I certainly don’t agree with that point of view.) In the end, I can’t see how a discussion of learning theories can be avoided. Unless readers of the book have this basic understanding of the different views of learning, they will not be in a good position to make choices, especially regarding the use of technology for teaching and learning. In particular, I see a danger of becoming dogmatic and blinkered by unchallenged assumptions about the nature of learning that results from not exploring alternative theories. But lastly, as Kurt Lewin said, there is nothing more practical than a good theory. A good theory helps us make informed decisions in areas of uncertainty. So, I am sharing here my first draft with you. Please note this is just part of the whole chapter, which also includes the following:

Today the Mustadafin Foundation, under the theme “The power of reading”, invites parents to come and listen to their children recite stories and poetry at the Tafelsig Library in Mitchells Plain in Cape Town.

Foundation director Ghairunisa Johnstone-Cassiem said: “We firmly believe that literacy and education is the cornerstone in building a positive future. We strive to provide every human being with skills and opportunities to overcome their circumstances, to become agents for positive change through education.”

3 Misconceptions About Innovation in Education April 30, 2017 by George 4 Comments “Innovation” is one of the most used words in education right now. It is something that I am obviously passionate about, hence the reason I wrote the book, “The Innovator’s Mindset”. I am scared that we use the word “innovation” in the wrong way when there is power to this type of thinking. Words do not become “buzzwords” because they are used too frequently; they become “buzzwords” when they are used frequently in an incorrect manner. Here are some misconceptions about the word that we need to dispell to protect “innovation” in education from becoming a buzzword.

I’ve often told my students I’m never disappointed when “All we did was read” today. Reading is a critical attribute of a lifelong learner, yet many students seem to learn that reading is just something teachers make you do in school. The idea of reading for pleasure or reading for passion is foreign to many students when the only reading they know is the reading the teacher assigns. Independent reading teaching strategies can help change that. Instead of students reading because they have to, independent reading teaching strategies give students a chance to read because they want to. Instead of the teacher selecting and assigning reading material, the constraints are loosened and students are given the chance to have control. If you’re interested in teaching strategies that facilitate independent reading in your classroom, here are some golden guidelines to consider for making it successful experience for your students.

Remember merit badges? The reward for kids who master new skills has been rebooted—for their teachers.

So-called “micro-credentials” work a lot like scouting badges. Teachers complete a specific activity to develop a critical competency for their role, and earn a micro-credential based on showing mastery of the skill. They can collect micro-credentials to document growing expertise and share their accomplishments in the classroom.

This targeted training is in stark contrast to traditional, strikingly ineffective teacher professional development (PD). With its focus on seat time—awarding credit for showing up to workshops, conferences, or classes—formal PD has ignored whether teachers actually learn new skills, apply them, and improve student outcomes. And with its reliance on generalized, off-the-shelf programs, most formal PD does not target the specific skills or expertise an individual teacher may need to improve her practice.

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